Superstition

The idea of presenting logical arguments against superstition might sound absurd. And it is. But to hell with that.

My claim is that superstitious people are racists. Here's the argument.

Actually, before the argument itself, let me give a broad, vague definition of the word "racism". Here, I am using the word to mean a belief that a subset of people are superior to the rest in some sense. Lots of further definitions might be necessary to make precise what I mean, but I am in no mood to go into semantic pedantry.

If you believe in a superstition, you must also consider yourself and a set of people who are similarly superstitious superior to "distant people". By "similarly superstitious", I mean others who have the same superstitious belief. And by "distant people", I mean people from the world around who do not share your culture, belief-system.

Now, I think that there are superstitions that are experiential. These are also results of the (often irrational) human tendency to search for causation of events experienced. You're watching a cricket match where the team you are supporting is winning - you change your seat and they end up losing - there is a tendency to associate the two independent events, which is superstition. I will disregard these "causative superstitions".

But then there are other superstitions that are engrained into minds of people by the culture or belief-system of the people around them -- waking up on the right (usually, the right) side of the bed, "touch wood" etc would fall into this category, which for convenience, I shall call "cultural superstition". Very few (almost none) cultural superstitions are universal. But, there is always a presumed reasoning behind these things. Whether the reason is itself known or not, the existence of the reasoning is accepted -- "People were not crazy to make up things with no reason" would probably be a reply to questioning these. There is also a predisposed greatness of the people who've actually figured these out. So, in this sense, there is pride of this knowledge.

You have cultural superstitions -- you know not everyone in the world believe in it -- so, either you believe that not believing will nullify its effect, in which case, you can nullify the effect on yourself by not believing, and you are rid of cultural superstitions -- or, you believe the distant people are stupid to have not figured it out yet, to be suffering as a consequence of it and to not have correlated cause with effect; and your race is superior for it has done these things -- you are a racist.

As an aside, I think the ultimate, most annoying argument against someone arguing against superstitions is to claim that he/she is superstitious about arguing for superstition.

Loyalty vs. skepticism

We humans have the problem of being biased in favour of something if we have been involved in it for a while. It is pretty hard, and requires a lot of guts, to get out of something we are already involved in, if and when there is evidence to counter our belief in some other thing that is necessary to continue doing that thing. This is most commonly referred to as loyalty, and most often considered good.

And therein lies the cause of most problems. Being loyal to my family makes me blind to its blemishes. Being loyal to my religion makes me tolerate its bigotries. Loyalty to my traditions makes me oversee their historical misinterpretations and exploitations that continue to have an impact today; to my employer makes me disbelieve his / her / its shortcomings that doesn't directly affect me; to my country makes me insensitive to its atrocities; to my ideas makes me incapable of figuring out my bias.

The more the time we spend in doing something, the more we want to believe that thing to be right, the more vehement our support for it, the more biased we are, the more time we spend doing that thing.

Skepticism, then, is the only hope. But if we are skeptical of everything, then what are we but skeptics? And if I am skeptical of skepticism, am I a skeptic or am I not?

Perspective

We are all so inherently biased. When you look at your reflection in a mirror, you are laterally inverted. But, yet you are upright. What then is being upright? Or inverted? Put in another way, being upright goes hand in hand with being inverted, laterally. Throw away the bias for direction, and the previous sentence implies that any image in any mirror is upright and inverted at the same time...